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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

From May 23-30, 2016 FindMyPast is hosting a Tree Challenge. If you upload a family tree, the hints you get on ancestors will be completely free during this week and will be added permanently to your tree.

To encourage you to try this out, FindMyPast is giving away some prizes. If you share any discoveries you make on your tree via social media with the hashtag #TreeChallenge then you have a chance of winning an expert bundle worth $1000. This includes a a 64 GB Ipad mini4, a
three TB hard drive and a 12 month subscription to Family Tree (UK) magazine. They will also be giving away a 12 month world subscription on their social media channels each day during the challenge.

Uploading a Tree

In order to test this out I created a free, non-subcriber account on FindMyPast. I then uploaded a gedcom file with one branch of my family. It took less than a minute to upload the gedcom file. Sometimes, when there is a lot of traffic the process can be slower.

Watch how I uploaded my gedcom in this YouTube video:

Reviewing and Adding Hints

Next I waited for ancestor hints. Once I started to get ancestor hints I reviewed them to see if they matched my relative. In the example in the next video I found one matching ancestor hint and rejected two. You can watch how I did that.

What is great about this particular promotion is that the hints and corresponding transcriptions and images are accessible for free during this promotion. Any hints that you add to your tree will remain permanently in your tree even after the promotion is over. I had a few surprizes during my adventure and that turned out to be a great learning experience for getting to know how FindMyPast works.

So give it a try. You may find some records for your ancestors that you don't find on other largedatabase sites. And if you don't have any database subscriptions this is a great opportunity for you to do some research!

If you need to know how to do anything else on FindMyPast, let me know and I will create another video!

Disclosure: I'm a FindMyPast ambassador which means they give me a free subscription to play around with their site. I did NOT use that to create these videos. Instead, I opened a new, free, non-subscription site so that I could exactly replicate what the experience would be like for new, non-subscription users. That is what you see in the videos.